G&A: The Contest Blog

The deadline has been extended for the upcoming Pacific Coast/Beyond Baroque Books Award, given for a poetry manuscript by a writer living in California, Oregon, or Washington. The winner will receive $2,000 and publication in the Pacific Coast Poetry Series, an imprint of Beyond Baroque Books. Beyond Baroque editors Suzanne Lummis and Henry Morro will judge.

To apply, submit a manuscript between 48 and 70 pages with a $5 submission fee via postal mail to Pacific Coast Poetry Series, Beyond Baroque, 681 Venice Boulevard, Venice, CA  90291, by May 1 (the original deadline was February 15). For more information, visit the website or e-mail Liz Camfiord at liz@beyondbaroque.org.

Beyond Baroque, a literary arts center dedicated to advancing public awareness and involvement in the literary arts, was established in 1968 as an avant-garde poetry magazine of the same name, which published emerging and overlooked writers, particularly from the Los Angeles area. Beyond Baroque Books was launched in 1998, and continues to “unearth cult rarities as well as collections by noted performance poets, educations, and cultural leaders.”

Submissions are currently open for the 2016 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, an annual award given for a full-length manuscript by a poet living in the Upper Midwest. The winner receives $10,000 and publication by Milkweed Editions.
Administered in partnership with Milkweed Editions and the Lindquist & Vennum Foundation, the award was established in 2011 with the goal of celebrating the work of exceptional poets from the Upper Midwest; poets residing in North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin are eligible to apply. The editors of Milkweed Editions will select five finalists, and acclaimed poet A. Van Jordan will select the winning manuscript.

To enter, submit one hard copy of an unpublished, book-length collection of poetry, along with a single-page cover sheet that includes contact, submission, and biographical information to: ATTN: Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Open Book, Suite 300, Minneapolis, MN 55415.

The deadline to submit is March 1. There is no entry fee. The winner will be announced in April or May. Visit the website, or call the Milkweed Editions office at (612) 332-3192 for more information.

Milkweed Editions is one of the nation’s leading independent, nonprofit book publishers. Established in 1980, the publisher’s mission is to “identify, nurture, and publish transformative literature, and build an engaged community around it.” The press publishes fifteen to twenty titles per year.

Claremont Graduate University announced last week the finalists for the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. The annual award is given to honor a book by a midcareer poet. The finalists for the $10,000 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, given annually for a debut poetry collection, were also announced.

The finalists for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award are Kyle Dargan for Honest Engine (University of Georgia Press), Ross Gay for Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (University of Pittsburgh Press), Amy Gerstler for Scattered at Sea (Penguin), Fred Moten for The Little Edges (Wesleyan), and Jennifer Moxley for The Open Secret (Flood Editions).

The finalists for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award are Meg Day for Last Psalm at Sea Level (Barrow Street), Bethany Schultz Hurst for Miss Lost Nation (Anhinga Press), Michael Morse for Void and Compensation (Canarium Books), Danez Smith for [insert] boy (YesYes Books), and Henry Walters for Field Guide a Tempo (Hobblebush Books).

The judges for both awards were Stephen Burt, Elena Karina Byrne, Brian Kim Stefans, Don Share, and judge chair Chase Twichell. The winners will be announced in March and honored at a ceremony in April at Pomona College in Claremont, California.

Previous winners of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, now in its twenty-fourth year, include Angie Estes, Afaa Michael Weaver, Marianne Boruch, Timothy Donnelly, and Chase Twichell. Previous winners of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, established in 1993, include Brandon Som, Yona Harvey, Heidy Steidlmayer, Katherine Larson, and Atsuro Riley.

Photos (clockwise from top left): Dargan (Dale Robbins), Gay (Zach Hetrick), Gerstler, Moxley, Moten

Submissions are currently open for the North Carolina Writers Network (NCWN) Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, given annually for an unpublished short story. The winner receives $1,000 and possible publication in the Thomas Wolfe Review.
All writers, regardless of location, are eligible to apply. Using the online submission manager, submit two copies of an unpublished short story or self-contained novel excerpt of up to 3,000 words, along with a $25 entry fee ($15 for NCWN members), by January 30. Writers may also submit via postal mail to: North Carolina Writers Network, Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, Great Smokies Writing Program, Attn: Nancy Williams, One University Hts, UNC Asheville, NC 28804. The winner will be announced in early April. Visit the website for more information.

Administered by the Great Smokies Writing Program at the University of North Carolina in Asheville, the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize honors celebrated North Carolina novelist Thomas Wolfe (1900–1938), a contemporary of William Faulkner who influenced many authors of modern American literature. The award has been given annually since 2006; previous winners include Mesha Maren (2015), Susan Levi Wallach (2014), Jude Whelchel (2014), and Kevin Winchester (2013).

Photo: Thomas Wolfe

Submissions are currently open for the 2016 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, given biannually for a creative nonfiction manuscript-in-progress by an emerging author. The winner will receive a $12,000 advance and publication by Graywolf Press. The winner will also receive editorial support and guidance from Graywolf Press to complete the project. Brigid Hughes, founding editor of independent literary and culture magazine A Public Space, will judge.

Writers residing in the United States who have not published more than two books of nonfiction are eligible to apply. No prior publication is required. Using the online submission manager, submit a one-page cover letter that includes a brief biographical statement, a two to ten-page overview of the manuscript, and a minimum of a hundred pages, or 25,000 words, from the manuscript by January 31. There is no application fee.

The Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize “emphasizes innovation in form,” and seeks “projects that test the boundaries of literary nonfiction,” rather than “straightforward memoirs.” Previous winners include Riverine by Angela Palm, The Empathy Exams: Essays by Leslie Jamison, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness by Kevin Young, and Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays by Eula Biss.

Founded in 1974, Graywolf Press is now considered one of the leading nonprofit literary publishers in the country. The press is “committed to the discovery and energetic publication of contemporary American and international literature.” Visit the website for more information.

Read an interview with Graywolf’s executive editor, Jeff Shotts, in the November/December 2014 issue of Poets & Writers.

Fiction writer Ann Pancake has received the inaugural Barry Lopez Visiting Writer in Ethics and Community Fellowship. As part of the fellowship, Pancake will spend several weeks in residence at the Ala Kukui retreat in Hana, Hawaii. She will also participate in outreach events and present a public talk on the contemporary writer’s social responsibility at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in Honolulu.

Sponsored by the Manoa Foundation of Honolulu, the annual fellowship was established by Frank Stewart and Debra Gwartney to honor the seventieth birthday of acclaimed writer and naturalist Barry Lopez, who is the author of fourteen books of fiction and nonfiction, most recently the short story collection Outside (Trinity University Press, 2014). The fellowship is given to a writer whose work “contributes to an awareness of the civic and ethical obligation of artists; that helps us understand, through storytelling, that the survival of a human world depends upon a commitment to integrity, empathy, and compassionate reconciliation; and inspires us to take social responsibility for the perils, which we have created ourselves, to the human and non-human world.”

Fellows are nominated and chosen by a committee of editors and writers. This year’s judges were Barry Lopez, Debra Gwartney, Jane Hirshfield, Pico Iyer, and Frank Stewart.

Ann Pancake has written several novels and short story collections, most recently Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley (Counterpoint Press, 2015). She lives in Seattle and teaches at the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.

Watch Barry Lopez give a keynote address at Poets & Writers Live in Portland, Oregon, last fall.

The National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) announced the finalists for its 2015 awards yesterday. Poets Terrance Hayes and Ada Limón, fiction writers Lauren Groff and Anthony Marra, and nonfiction writers Ta-Nehisi Coates and Maggie Nelson are among the thirty finalists. The annual awards are given in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, criticism, autobiography, and biography.

The poetry finalists are Ross Gay for Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude (University of Pittsburgh Press), Terrance Hayes for How to Be Drawn (Penguin), Ada Limón for Bright Dead Things (Milkweed Editions), Sinéad Morrissey for Parallax: And Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and the late Frank Stanford for What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford (Copper Canyon Press).

The fiction finalists are Paul Beatty for The Sellout (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Lauren Groff for Fates and Furies (Riverhead), Valeria Luiselli for The Story of My Teeth (Coffee House Press), Anthony Marra for The Tsar of Love and Techno (Hogarth), and Ottessa Moshfegh for Eileen (Penguin Press).

The autobiography finalists are Elizabeth Alexander for The Light of the World (Grand Central Publishing), Vivian Gornick for The Odd Woman and the City (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), George Hodgman for Bettyville (Viking), Margo Jefferson for Negroland (Pantheon), and Helen Macdonald for H Is for Hawk (Grove Press).

Other finalists include Ta-Nehisi Coates for Between the World and Me (Spiegel & Grau) and Maggie Nelson for The Argonauts (Graywolf Press) for the criticism prize. Farrar, Straus and Giroux led the field with five of its titles nominated for awards. Small presses with titles up for awards include Graywolf Press, Copper Canyon Press, Coffee House Press, and Milkweed Editions.

The NBCC also announced that Kirstin Valdez Quade is the recipient of the John Leonard Prize for her debut story collection, Night at the Fiestas (Norton). Carlos Lozada, an associate editor and nonfiction book critic at the Washington Post, won the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, and writer Wendell Berry will receive the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.

First given in 1975, the National Book Critics Circle awards are nominated and selected by the NBCC board of directors, which is made up of twenty-four critics and editors. The 2014 winners included Claudia Rankine in poetry for Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press), Marilynne Robinson in fiction for Lila (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and Roz Chast in autobiography for Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (Bloomsbury). This year’s winners will be announced on March 17 at the New School in New York City.

Clockwise from top left: Hayes (MacArthur Foundation), Limón (Sarah Shatz), Groff (Megan Brown), Nelson (Harry Dodge), Coates (Liz Lynch), Marra

The finalists for the 2016 Story Prize have been announced. The author of the winning short story collection will receive $20,000, and the two runners-up will receive $5,000. This year, the Story Prize judges selected three finalists from a hundred submissions, representing sixty-four different publishers and imprints. The finalists are:

• Charles Baxter’s There’s Something I Want You to Do (Pantheon)
• Adam Johnson’s Fortune Smiles (Random House)
• Colum McCann’s Thirteen Ways of Looking (Random House)

  

Charles Baxter is the author of five previous short story collections, and is a winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story. He has also published five novels. He lives in Minneapolis.

Colum McCann is the author of two previous short story collections, as well as six previous novels. He has won the National Book Award and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, among others. He lives in New York City.

Adam Johnson’s story collection Fortune Smiles won the 2015 National Book Award for Fiction. His novel The Orphan Master’s Son won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the California Book Award. He lives in San Francisco.

Now in its twelfth year, the Story Prize was established in 2004 by Larry Dark and Julie Lindsey to honor collections of short fiction, and to attract more attention to the form. Each year Dark and Lindsey select the finalists, and a panel of authors select the winner. Anthony Doerr, Rita Meade, and Kathryn Schulz will be this year’s final judges. Elizabeth McCracken took last year’s prize for her collection Thunderstruck. The 2016 winner will be announced on Wednesday, March 2, at an award ceremony at the New School in New York City. Visit the Story Prize website for more information.

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has announced the thirty-seven recipients of its 2016 Creative Writing Fellowships in prose. Each of the fellows will receive twenty-five thousand dollars for writing, research, travel, and general career advancement.

This year’s recipients are:

Elisabeth Tova Bailey
Dean Bakopoulos
Bill Cheng
Diane Cook
Lucy Corin
Michael Croley
Meghan Daum
Peter Ho Davies
Jack Driscoll
Jerry Gabriel
Kaitlyn Greenidge
Rav Grewal-Kök
Paul Harding
Jamey Hatley
Kevin Haworth
Nellie Hermann
Vedran Husić
Laleh Khadivi
R. O. Kwon
Joy Ladin
Éireann Lorsung
Anthony Marra
Monica McFawn
David Philip Mullins
Lenore Myka
Dina Nayeri
Celeste Ng
Téa Obreht
Mehdi Tavana Okasi
Leslie Parry
Joseph Rathgeber
Amy Rowland
Alison Stine
Aaron Thier
Samrat Upadhyay
Melissa Yancy
Mario Alberto Zambrano

The annual grants are given to emerging and established writers and alternate between poetry and prose.

“Since its inception, the creative writing fellowship program has awarded more than forty-five million dollars to a diverse group of more than three thousand writers, many of them emerging writers at the start of their careers,” said Amy Stolls, the NEA’s director of literature programs. “These thirty-seven extraordinary new fellows provide more evidence of the NEA’s track record of discovering and supporting excellent writers.”

A group of twenty-three readers and panelists chose the recipients from 1,763 applications. The 2017 fellowships will be given in poetry; the application deadline is March 9.